Osama Hamdan of the Hamas Political Bureau promised in a November 29, 2023 show on Bel Moubashar Online (Lebanon) that a "war of liberation is coming," not just another October 7, and that he doesn't think that it would be far off. When asked by the interviewer if he has any regrets over the October 7 attacks, he replied: "Regret for shattering an entire division of the occupation army?"

Interviewer: "If you could go back in time to October 6, would you still do what you did on October 7?"

Osama Hamdan: "Why would some people assume that we would go back on our acts of resistance?"

Interviewer: "So you have no regrets?"

Hamdan: "Regret for shattering an entire division of the occupation army?"

Interviewer: "You said that if the Israelis would make new arrests, after all the prisoners are released from [Israeli] prisons, you would carry out another operation. So can you promise another October 7?"

Hamdan: "I can promise that a war of liberation is coming, not just another October 7."

Interviewer: "In the foreseeable future?"

Hamdan: "I do not think it is far off."

After a seven-day pause, Israel has resumed its military campaign to eliminate Hamas. This will be a long and bloody fight given that the Islamist group is strongly entrenched and supported by other well-armed groups who were at its side during its assault on October 7.

While their ideologies and tactics may vary, these groups are an integral part of the broader Palestinian national movement and, whatever their immediate fate in Gaza, will remain an inescapable feature of the political landscape in the West Bank and beyond.

Without a clear vision for post-conflict Gaza — and particularly a plan for filling the void that would be created if Hamas were destroyed — Israel’s ground offensive will struggle to cope with the complex governance and security dynamics that will play out, as groups jockey for power.

Although the Israeli government has equated Hamas to Isis to mobilise western support, the two are different. Hamas espouses a form of Islamism that is rooted in Palestinian nationalism. The movement grew out of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s, and developed deep roots in Gazan society over the decades, based on its continued struggle for Palestinian rights and ability to provide local services and governance, ultimately resulting in the establishment of an effective civil service of 40,000 Gazans.

A rise in Palestinian support for armed resistance against Israel over the past two years has enabled the movement to strengthen its domestic standing. Before October 7, a survey for the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research put its public support at 34 per cent — on par with its secular rival Fatah. Hamas’s popularity has surged since then, particularly in the West Bank, where its green flag is increasingly ubiquitous. Such broad-based public support stands in contrast with Palestinian perceptions of a corrupt Palestinian Authority (PA) that has sold out the Palestinian cause to Israel.

Hamas has also grown strong thanks to its marriage of convenience (rather than ideological alignment) with Iran, which has provided it with guns and cash to fight their common foe, Israel. Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, is estimated to have some 25,000 fighters. According to Israel, up to 5,000 have been killed, though its most senior military and political leaders remain untouched.

The second strongest group in Gaza is Islamic Jihad. Since its establishment in 1981 in the border town of Rafah, the group has dedicated itself to fighting Israel, developing its own military capabilities, including a significant arsenal of rockets aimed at Israeli towns. It too emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist network in Palestine but is more hardline than Hamas and was heavily inspired by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The group has grown even closer to Iran under its current leader, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, who is thought to be living under the protection of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Over the past two years, an influx of Iranian funding has helped expand its presence in the West Bank in places such as Jenin’s refugee camp.

Gaza’s militant groups are, however, not all Islamist. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades also have a considerable presence. They are the armed wing of Fatah, the largest political party in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (the international representative of the Palestinian people, which excludes Hamas). The brigades emerged as a loose network of military groups during the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising between 2000-2005.

Despite their political differences, Fatah factions regularly fight alongside Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have historically had an ambiguous relationship with the senior leadership of Fatah and the PA. Although they are likely to benefit from ties to some high-ranking officials, they are not controlled by Fatah’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas, who as the president of the PA continues to call for peace talks with Israel.

Islamist-leaning members of Fatah spawned another network of armed factions, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC). It is probably the third largest armed group in Gaza, and a strong ally of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad. While the group advocates armed struggle against Israel and is thought to be supported by Iran, it also backs a two-state solution through the creation of a Palestinian state.

Then there are a number of smaller left-wing PLO factions fighting in Gaza. These include the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) — two veteran Marxist-Leninist groups founded in the 1960s. The PFLP rose to notoriety between 1968-1972 when it hijacked international airlines. In 2001, it assassinated the Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze’evi. In Gaza, the PFLP operates mainly through its armed wing, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades. Its DFLP counterpart also has a track record of attacking Israelis and fighting side-by-side with Hamas in Gaza, despite being the first significant Palestinian faction to endorse a two-state solution in the 1970s.

These Palestinian nationalists should be distinguished from Salafi jihadists which, like Isis, aspire to establish an extremist Islamic caliphate in the Middle East. A small number of Salafi-jihadi groups exist in Gaza, some formed by members of Hamas who grew disillusioned with what they saw as its softening positions towards Israel.

Other groups were formed by local clans as a way of increasing their political clout. Some of their members fought with al-Qaeda against US troops in Iraq and call for the establishment of an Islamic emirate in Gaza. They have fallen under the influence of Bayt al-Maqdis — the Isis branch operating in Egypt’s Sinai province.

These Gaza groups are responsible for a few attacks on Israel, including an eyebrow-raising horseback charge against an Israeli border crossing in 2009. But they have mostly targeted Hamas, which they criticise for not imposing sharia.

As the strongest player in Gaza, Hamas has long been able to keep Salafi jihadis in check and police the many other armed factions to maintain law and order. Before October 7, it has also worked to prevent attacks on Israel as part of repeated ceasefires over the past decade. It ultimately came to see this as a trap that sought to co-opt it into managing Israel’s occupation on its behalf. But it does show that the movement can negotiate and abide by agreements with Israel, and impose these on other armed groups, when it considers this to be in its interest.

These intra-Palestinian dynamics were on full display during the recent ceasefire deal, which was complicated by the fact that other groups such as PRC and Islamic Jihad had taken their own Israeli hostages on October 7. However, Hamas was eventually able to enforce the terms of the agreement on them, leading to the release of several prisoners held by Islamic Jihad.

Taking Hamas out of the equation — as Israel is seeking to do — may be seen as a just response to the October 7 attacks. But this outcome risks plunging Gaza into protracted anarchy, given the continued lack of any viable post-conflict plan and the important governance and security role that Hamas has played across the Gaza Strip.

The city of Bristol in southwest England is a glorious place full of architectural, cultural and historic gems. If you haven’t been, it’s well worth a visit. Its airport, however, is rather bleak. Especially the car park outside – though I’ll admit my impression was formed during COVID when it was totally deserted and I had to wait two hours for a car rental employee to turn up.

Last week, it received a new adornment in the shape of a “multi-faith space” near the terminal. If, like me, you spend too much time on X, you may have already seen it. If not, I’d love to describe it for you – but that would be impossible. The multi-faith facility is totally featureless: all you can say about it is that it’s small, square and gray.

Yet despite its utter blandness, Bristol Airport’s multi-faith space has stayed with me for a week now, because it is the perfect illustration of how many people in the West now treat religion: As something so mild, inoffensive and nondescript that, no matter what religion you are – or in the colorless term they use, whatever faith – you can all just get on with it in a gray cube next to the short-term parking lot. It’s a lacuna that is affecting much enlightened Western thinking.

Don’t worry, this isn’t about to be my first column since October 7 that isn’t about the war with Hamas. Far from it. This is about how and why none of the international coverage and commentary on Hamas’ massacre in Gaza border communities, and the war it triggered, has addressed its religious aspects.

I have yet to read a single piece on it in any mainstream publication (there may have been one that I missed, but I’ve read or at least skimmed hundreds of articles and haven’t seen any) or heard anything on it. In any of the dozens of interviews I’ve done during this period, I was only asked once about the religious aspect – and that was in the context of a discussion about the parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

Yes, the context. We’ve heard so much about the context. About how the context is the Israel-Palestine conflict, and all kinds of fashionable words like “apartheid” and “settler-colonialism.” These really have nothing to do with the context of what happened on October 7 and since, except that they are words a certain type of Western observer – whether in the guise of a journalist, academic or activist – is comfortable using.

Israel Palestinians Hamas IS

All of them, even if they actually know something about the issue they’re pontificating about, blithely ignore the fact that Hamas is an acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah – Islamic Resistance Movement. I mean, it’s practically in the name.

Even if you haven’t sat through the entire 47 minutes of the Israel Defense Forces’ compilation of the horrors of that day but have seen a bit of the GoPro footage made by the attackers themselves, you can see that they were constantly invoking God’s name, not the liberation of Palestine.

And whenever they mention their victims – such as the video made by the attacker in which he calls his parents from inside one of the kibbutzim to brag about how many people he has just killed – they don’t call them “Israelis” or “colonial-settlers.” They simply call them “Jews.”

Yet there is a blatant refusal to take them at face value. To listen to what they actually say.

Acknowledging that Hamas’ killers claimed to be acting in the name of their religion is not maligning Islam – or to use another fashionable term, “Islamophobic.” It doesn’t mean that they are the sole authentic representatives of a faith that has hundreds of millions of adherents. It is simply sticking to the facts. However, this is somehow inconceivable to almost every Westerner writing or opining on the events.

There are two main reasons for this denial. The first is the total lack of any frame of reference for a war taking place in our lifetimes in which religion is a major motive. A civilization that can come up with a multi-faith area and expect people of any faith to actually pray in it really has no concept of the place faith has in people’s lives. And when clever people who make a living out of speaking in the media don’t understand something, they usually deflect and use terms they do understand, despite their irrelevancy and inadequacy.

The second is that the partisans of the Palestinian cause who do understand the religious aspects – many of them don’t – prefer to use these Western terms as well because they believe, with good cause, that addressing those aspects won’t help endear their cause to Western audiences. So they emphasize the “resistance” in Hamas’ name and ignore the “Islamic.” But they are doing their cause no favors with this approach.

FRANCE-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-DEMO

The contradicting national narratives that are at the base of the Israel-Palestine conflict are fundamentally religious. It doesn’t matter that most, though by no means all, of the early Zionist leaders and thinkers were secular.

The movement to rebuild the ancient Jewish homeland is at its core a religious belief – just as much of the persecution of Jews throughout the centuries that made (and still make) such a homeland necessary was and still is rooted in religion. This was true long before Israel’s government became dominated by parties like Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), Religious Zionism and United Torah Judaism.

It’s also true of Palestinian nationalism, even though many of its early leaders were not especially Islamist or even Muslims. Religion (both Islam and, to a latter degree, Christianity) played a major role in their opposition to even the tiniest manifestation of Jewish sovereignty in the region, long before the foundation of Hamas in 1987. And now, with Hamas competing for the leadership of the Palestinian people, it certainly is a massive factor. And yet so many people insist on dismissing it?

If anyone with good faith – and I mean “faith” here in its original meaning, not as a dull alternative to religion – wants to actually find a solution to the conflict, accepting the fact that it’s above all a religious-nationalist conflict, and not some race-based and settler-colonial artificial concept imported from Western campuses, would be a good place to start.

With all eyes on Gaza, Hamas might send the West Bank up in flames
Ksenia Svetlova
3 December 2023, 5:51 am 12

Throughout the weeklong truce between Israel and Hamas that ended Friday, jubilant Palestinian crowds gathered near Ofer military prison to greet the female and teenage security prisoners who were released daily as part of a hostage deal.

Many waved the green flags of Hamas, while the ex-prisoners — even those affiliated with other Palestinian factions — thanked Hamas military commander Muhammad Deif and political leader Yahya Sinwar. Palestinian Authority officials were nowhere in sight — they were not welcome in the sea of green.

Even before the current conflict — which began on October 7 when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping another 240 to the Gaza Strip — Israel held thousands of Palestinian security prisoners. As of October 17, Israel said it was holding another 118 “unlawful combatants” captured on and after the October 7 atrocities. More recent figures have not been released.

The prisoners issue has long been top of mind for Palestinians — and it’s clear that Hamas has gained valuable political leverage by securing the release of 240 prisoners in the hostage deal.

Combined with the October 7 massacre, which is perceived by many Palestinians as an important military achievement and which reignited the world’s interest in the Palestinian cause (even at the cost of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza), it’s easy to understand why Hamas now enjoys unprecedented support in the West Bank.

According to an Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) poll, Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, saw an unbelievable 89% increase in public support since the outbreak of the war. Its spokesman, Abu Obeida, was turned into a hero for many young people in 2021 during Operation Guardian of the Walls.

Hamas popularity surges

Hamas — and especially its military wing — enjoys a surge in popularity while the Palestinian Authority is suffering immense damage to its reputation on the Palestinian street.

Although PA President Mahmoud Abbas is criticized in Israel for his refusal to loudly condemn the October 7 Hamas atrocities, in the West Bank he is being accused by his many enemies — Hamas first among them — of being a traitor and a collaborator with Israel. Just late last month, armed Palestinians killed two alleged informants for Israel in the West Bank city of Tulkarem and an angry mob reportedly dragged and stomped on their corpses in the street. It is not clear where Palestinian security forces were during the events.

The execution was a clear sign of shifting power dynamics in the West Bank and a frightening message to Ramallah. Hamas, meanwhile, is not circumspect about its goals. When the terror group mobilized crowds on the night of October 19 after a blast at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital — apparently due to an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad projectile — it demanded not only victory over Israel, but the dismantling of Abbas’s regime.

Unlike his predecessor Yasser Arafat, Abbas has eschewed violence against Israel. But his diplomacy has yielded little in terms of Palestinian independence, making him an easy target for his violent opponents in Hamas.

Fuel on the fire: Terror attacks and settler violence

During his meeting with Israeli leaders on November 30, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken again stressed the need for Israel to immediately hold extreme Israeli settlers accountable for violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Despite being underreported in Israel, violent attacks by extremist settlers are widespread, and a familiar phenomenon to many Palestinians. In the past, they have resulted in burned property and physical altercations. They have only increased in intensity since the start of the current conflict, with Palestinians reporting cases of abuse and murder, amid claims that the IDF does little to protect them from settler extremists.

Meanwhile, settlers have protested outside the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, claiming their lives are endangered due to insufficient Israeli response to deadly terror attacks in the West Bank.

Since the October 7 onslaught, the IDF is aggressively operating in Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and other West Bank towns and cities to thwart planned terror attacks, eliminate underground tunnels and confiscate deadly weapons.

According to the Palestinian Authority health ministry, 225 Palestinians have been killed in these operations and clashes with the IDF, and in a few cases at the hands of violent settlers. Among the dead are numerous Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihan terrorists, but also 50 children and teenagers.

This past week, two boys, Ahmed al-Ghoul and Basel Abu al-Wafa, aged 8 and 15, were killed in the Jenin refugee camp during an exchange of fire between the IDF and Palestinian gunmen.

The tense calm that prevailed during the first week of the Gaza conflict is clearly over. The combination of an emboldened Hamas, Israeli military raids, settler violence, a deterioration of economic conditions, incitement and pure desperation might plunge the West Bank back into the abyss.

In this case, Israel might find itself militarily engaged on yet another front and, as in Gaza, without any reasonable Palestinian partner to engage with.

For years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had weakened the PA in the West Bank and allowed Hamas to become strengthened in Gaza. Today, this failed policy is bearing some poisonous fruit: Hamas might be defeated in Gaza, but ignite an intifada in the West Bank and oust the more moderate regime of Mahmoud Abbas.

IDF reservist arrested for shooting Israeli man during Jerusalem terror attack
Israeli military police arrest reserve soldier Aviad Frija, who said he thought the Jewish man he shot was one of the Palestinian terrorists attacking a Jerusalem bus stop. Far-right minister: 'A national hero'

IDF Military Police announced, on Monday, the arrest of Aviad Frija, an Israeli reservist soldier who shot and killed an Israeli civilian during a deadly shooting attack in Jerusalem last Thursday.

Frija was brought in for interrogation on Monday, along with another soldier, who was later released and also there during the attack. Frija’s lawyers said video of the incident “creates a partial and misleading impression” and does not show “the rest of the shooting carried out by the soldier and others on the scene.”

Frija told police he had thought the civilian, Yuval Kestelman, was one of the terrorists and opened fire on him. "He was on the road waving his hands. There was a moment when he made a move with his hand and I sensed danger, so I shot again.”

Commenting on the incident, on Sunday, the IDF said Kestelman was killed tragically and horrifically. The IDF said soldiers are not supposed to shoot anyone who raises their hands, signalling they are unarmed. It said the incident, involving a regular duty soldier, as well as Frija, a reservist, would be investigated and that the two soldiers involved had their weapons confiscated.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, discussing Kestelman death on Saturday, said that “arms distribution has a price, that's life.”

After speaking with the victim's father, Moshe Kestelman, on Sunday, Netanyahu issued a statement saying, “Yuval saved many lives in an act of supreme bravery, but unfortunately a terrible tragedy happened there —the man who was saving others was himself killed. This matter must be thoroughly investigated.”

On Monday, Minister Amichai Eliyahu called Frija a “national hero” and said soldiers should shoot to kill terrorists. In an interview with the news website Ynet, the far-right minister said,"We need to validate killing [terrorists], and pay attention, keep our eyes open. We have to get to the point where these terrorists are dead and deterred. In the end, terrorists have to go to the Creator, and that's where we need to get to.”

In a statement, the IDF spokesman said, "the reserves soldier, suspected of the shooting that led to the death of the late Yuval Doron Kestelman, was questioned on Sunday by military police interrogators and, at this stage, has been taken into preliminary custody. His interrogation is expected to continue on Monday."

The scene of the terror attack, at the entrance to Jerusalem, on Thursday.

Kestelman, 38, was first to fire at the terrorists who killed 3 Israelis at the entrance to Jerusalem, on Thursday morning. Frija, one of the soldiers who arrived immediately afterward, said he thought Kestelman was with the terrorists and shot and killed him as he tried to signal that he posed no danger. Two other soldiers were also at the scene, one of whom was wounded by soldiers' gunfire. According to police, the investigation shows Frija caused Kestelman death and therefore no autopsy was performed.

Frija was interviewed on right-leaning Channel 14 on Thursday and boasted about the confirmed killing. The interview took place before it became known that the person he shot was an Israeli citizen. “We shot until they fell,” Frija said, adding: "It's very lucky I was in the right place at the right time, all IDF soldiers are dying to mark an X."

Frija said he was active as a member of the Hilltop Youth, an extremist, religious-nationalist youth group in and around West Bank settlements. “I was in the hills, and in the farms and in favor of settling the land, and I did a lot, not to boast, but I do belong to this stream,” he said.

Right-wing government officials, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and MK Tzvi Succot, publicly praised Frija, posting his name and picture and calling him a "hero." After news came out that an innocent civilian was shot to death, the posts in his praise were deleted.

WASHINGTON—Israel has assembled a system of large pumps it could use to flood Hamas’s vast network of tunnels under the Gaza Strip with seawater, a tactic that could destroy the tunnels and drive the fighters from their underground refuge but also threaten Gaza’s water supply, U.S. officials said.

The Israel Defense Forces finished assembling large seawater pumps roughly one mile north of the Al-Shati refugee camp around the middle of last month. Each of at least five pumps can draw water from the Mediterranean Sea and move thousands of cubic meters of water per hour into the tunnels, flooding them within weeks.

Israel first informed the U.S. of the option early last month, prompting a discussion weighing its feasibility and effect on the environment against the military value of disabling the tunnels, officials said.

U.S. officials said they didn’t know how close the Israeli government was to carrying out the plan. Israel hasn’t made a final decision to move ahead, nor has it ruled the plan out, officials said.

Sentiment inside the U.S. was mixed. Some U.S. officials privately expressed concern about the plan, while other officials said the U.S. supports the disabling of the tunnels and said there wasn’t necessarily any U.S. opposition to the plan. The Israelis have identified about 800 tunnels so far, though they acknowledge the network is bigger than that.

The weekslong process of flooding the tunnels would enable Hamas fighters, and potentially hostages, to move out, a person familiar with the plan said. It isn’t clear whether Israel would even consider using the pumps before all the hostages are released from Gaza. The Palestinian militants who attacked Israel on Oct. 7 took more than 200 hostages and brought them back to the Gaza Strip.

“We are not sure how successful pumping will be since nobody knows the details of the tunnels and the ground around them,” the person said. “It’s impossible to know if that will be effective because we don’t know how seawater will drain in tunnels no one has been in before.”

The deliberation over the plan to flood the tunnels illustrates the balance Israel’s forces must make between pursuing their war aims and the intense international pressure they face to protect civilians. The Israeli military campaign has flattened neighborhoods and the fighting has displaced more than a million Gazans from their homes in the crowded strip of territory.

An Israel Defense Forces official declined to comment on the flooding plan, but said: “The IDF is operating to dismantle Hamas’s terror capabilities in various ways, using different military and technological tools.”


Hamas has used the extensive tunnel system to hide, move undetected between houses in Gaza and hold hostages. Some of the more sophisticated tunnels were built with reinforced concrete, contain power and communication lines, and are tall enough for an average-size man to stand up in them.

Most Gazans don’t currently have access to clean water. Among the sources for drinking water in Gaza are purification plants that have been recently disabled. Before Oct. 7, three Israeli pipelines sent water into Gaza. Of those, one has shut down and the other two operate at sharply reduced levels.

At its peak, the system provided 83 liters of water per person a day. Now Palestinians receive no more than three liters a day, according to the United Nations. The U.N. says the minimum should be 15 liters a day.

Because it isn’t clear how permeable the tunnels are or how much seawater would seep into the soil and to what effect, it is hard to fully assess the impact of pumping seawater into the tunnels, said Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It’s hard to tell what pumping seawater will do to the existing water and sewage infrastructure. It is hard to tell what it will do to groundwater reserves. And it’s hard to tell the impact on the stability of nearby buildings,” Alterman said.

Former U.S. officials familiar with the issue confirmed that Israeli and U.S. officials had discussed flooding the tunnels with seawater but said they didn’t know the current status of the plan.

The former officials acknowledged such an operation would put the Biden administration in a tough position and perhaps bring global condemnation, but said it was one of the few effective options for permanently disabling a Hamas tunnel system estimated to stretch for about 300 miles.

One of the former officials said Gaza’s water and sanitation systems are badly damaged and heavily polluted, and would need to be reconstructed with international assistance after the war.

Wim Zwijnenburg, who has studied the impact of war on the environment in the Middle East, said that assuming that about one-third of the tunnel network is already damaged, Israel would have to pump roughly 1 million cubic meters of seawater to disable the rest.

Gaza’s aquifer, from which the population draws for drinking water and other uses, is already becoming saltier with a rise in the sea level, requiring more energy to fuel the desalination plants on which the population depends, said Zwijnenburg, who works for PAX, a Netherlands-based peace organization.

Flooding could affect Gaza’s already polluted soil, and hazardous substances stored in the tunnels could seep into the ground, he said in an email.

Egypt in 2015 used seawater to flood tunnels operated by smugglers under the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, prompting complaints from nearby farmers about damaged crops.

Typically, militaries charged with clearing tunnels, including Israel, use dogs and robots to check for threats or to search for hostages before sending ground troops in, said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and officer in the Marine Corps and CIA.

“Dogs are most effective,” he said, but need to be followed by troops to clear the tunnels. “Robots move slow and break. And using humans is risky.”

Using water over a long period would force Hamas fighters out, Mulroy said.

But “if you salted the water, it could compound the humanitarian crisis,” he said.

More details unveiled of IDF intel on Oct. 7 plans, consults hours before Hamas attack

The top commanders of the Israel Defense Forces were aware, in the hours, days and months that preceded the Hamas-led devastating October 7 onslaught in southern Israel, that the Palestinian terror group was drilling intensively for a planned large-scale invasion, and the Hamas leader even said publicly that this was his plan — but the military still didn’t act and even diverted forces away from the Gaza front, believing that this was empty boasting and that the terror group wasn’t interested in war, according to Hebrew media reports Monday.

In the latest evidence of information and assessments that should have enabled the Israeli military leadership to prevent the mass invasion, Channel 12 reported Monday evening that the intelligence officer of the Gaza Division prepared a presentation in July 2022 setting out “The Mass Invasion Plan of Hamas.”

One diagram from the presentation showed some 20 elite Nukhba Hamas terror squads invading southern Israel from Gaza. The presentation said the terror squads would be accompanied by engineering teams to breach the border fence and defenses in multiple places. The document reportedly included the sentence: “This invasion constitutes the gravest threat that IDF forces are facing in the defense [of Israel].”

Channel 12 further reported that the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate held a discussion three months before October 7, at which an officer — identified only by their rank and first initial, Brig. Gen. Peh — concluded: “We have tried but have not succeeded; we cannot say how [Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya] Sinwar will act, and therefore commanders in the field should take the necessary precautions.”

It said the conclusions of that discussion were given to the head of the IDF Intelligence Directorate Aharon Haliva, who ordered that intelligence gathering be stepped up, adding that this indeed happened.

On October 1, furthermore, the commander of the Gaza Division ordered a situational assessment, which found a “sharp increase in drills by Nukhba forces.” Six Hamas battalions were drilling once or twice a week, the report on that assessment said. It specified which battalions were drilling, including several in northern Gaza and one in Khan Younis in the south.

Nonetheless, according to the report, the intelligence officer of the division summed up: “In the tension between the economic benefits for Hamas and the continued disturbances [that were taking place at the Gaza border], it seems that at the moment things are heading toward an arrangement and a calming of the disturbances.”

On the night between October 6 and 7, hours before the early morning assault, an email was sent from an IDF base on the Gaza border describing “certain signs coming from Gaza” about an imminent attack. At the same time, the Shin Bet security agency also saw signs that something was up.

At around 1:30 a.m. on October 7, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi’s office manager was updated about this by the Shin Bet, and then by the IDF general in charge of the Southern Command. At around 3:30 a.m., Halevi was awakened. He asked to arrange a telephone consultation in order to make a situational assessment. That session took place some 90 minutes later.

The IDF’s operations chief arranged his own consultation ahead of Halevi’s, found the same signs of an imminent attack and sought explanations as to whether it was a drill or a strategic operation against Israel in the coming hours. That consultation concluded that no definitive explanation could be reached, and sought additional intelligence from the IDF’s 8200 signal intelligence unit.

When they had their consultation, Halevi, the head of IDF operations and the Southern Command general were updated on the signs of an imminent attack. Halevi asked for more information and ordered that the Israel Air Force be updated. He also ordered that the intelligence information be checked — including from a perspective skeptical of the prevailing assumption that Hamas was not interested in war.

This, said Channel 12, may have marked the first crack in the conception that Hamas was deterred, but it was not sufficient for Halevi to have ordered preparations for a major incident.

Three drones and a combat helicopter were mobilized.

Haliva, the head of the Intelligence Directorate, was not involved in these October 6-7 consultations. He was on vacation in Eilat. He was updated around 3 a.m. about the worrying signs from Gaza, but took no part in the consultations and wasn’t available by phone for them.

Haliva was quoted as later telling those around him that, even if he had participated in the consultations, he would have concluded that it was apparently a drill and dealing with the matter could wait until the morning. “It wouldn’t have changed the final result in any way,” he reportedly said.

Israel had multiple sources of information on Hamas’s drills and other preparations for an assault in the weeks ahead of October 7, reportedly including a 2022 Hamas attack plan.

Channel 12 also reported Monday that a TV drama series broadcast last year on Hamas TV that featured terrorists infiltrating Israel was publicly hailed by Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar as “an inseparable part of what we are preparing.”

Hamas TV broadcast the series during Ramadan in late spring 2022, the report said. It dramatized an attack on Israel featuring the use of white pickup trucks, the disabling of Israeli communications, and the targeting of kibbutzim and IDF bases — including the Re’im base where the IDF Gaza Division is located. It also showed soldiers being kidnapped, and the establishment of a Palestinian base at an IDF base.

Along with footage from the Hamas show, the Israeli network showed a clip from a televised award ceremony held in Gaza later in 2022, at which Sinwar handed out prizes to the show’s producers.

Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar speaks at what Israel’s Channel 12 says was a 2022 ceremony awarding prizes to a Hamas TV drama on a Hamas invasion of Israel. (Channel 12 screenshot, used in accordance with clause 27a of the copyright law)
“This series is an inseparable part of what we are preparing — the great preparations we are making with our brothers in the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades,” he was shown saying, referring to Hamas’s military wing. Sinwar cited “the weaponry that they are producing” and their “intelligence gathering.”

Hamas’s military wing, he said, “is absolutely planning for the liberation and return.”

Separately Monday, the Kan public broadcaster reported that two companies of troops from the IDF’s Commando Brigade, which were deployed to the Gaza border during the Jewish holiday season in September and October, were sent to the West Bank just two days before the October 7 massacre.

The 100 or so soldiers were redeployed to the West Bank’s Huwara, the report said, following a shooting attack there against an Israeli family.

The commando soldiers had been deployed to the Gaza border by the orders of the Operations Directorate, and they were not part of the regular forces securing the border, according to Kan.

The IDF has previously said forces were not diverted away from the Gaza border to the West Bank ahead of the October 7 onslaught.

A large number of troops had already been operating in the West Bank amid a rise in terror over the past two years.

The IDF has said it will investigate the circumstances that led to Hamas’s attack after the ongoing war’s end.

Europe Faces New Terrorism Threat Fueled by Israel-Hamas War
Dec. 5, 2023 3:16 pm ET

PARIS—Europe’s security services are confronting a resurgence of terrorism threats, in a sign of how fallout from the Israel-Hamas war is rippling across the West.

Radicals pledging allegiance to Islamic State have carried out three attacks on European soil—killing two people in France and one in Belgium—since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants spurred Israel’s bombing campaign and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. Images of the war—beamed to screens across the continent and flooding social media—are stirring Islamist radicals to lash out, European officials say, sometimes with deadly effect.

“The danger is real and as high as it’s been for a long time,” Thomas Haldenwang, president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said last week.


The threat has morphed since 2015 and 2016, when Islamic State operatives trained in Syria killed more than 150 people in a series of attacks in Paris and Brussels. Now security services are worried about lone-wolf attackers who operate without the support of known terror groups. That makes them less lethal but also harder to detect.

Governments have stepped up security at borders and sensitive targets, in particular Jewish institutions. Some governments are aiming to intensify surveillance of extremists, a major task given the large number of people in Europe who are on terrorism watch lists. France is planning to do that through the end of the Olympic Games in Paris next summer, a French security official said.

On Tuesday, European Union justice and home affairs ministers met in Brussels and discussed the security threats facing Europe. The European Commission said it would make €30 million (equivalent to about $32.3 million) available to member states for the protection of at-risk sites, including places of worship in the member states,

“With war between Israel, Hamas and the polarization it causes in our society, with the upcoming holiday season, there is a huge risk of terrorist attacks in the European Union,” said European Justice Commissioner Ylva Johansson. She didn’t say whether there was any specific threat behind the warning.

The killing of a tourist near the Eiffel Tower on Saturday by a man who authorities said was on France’s terrorism watch list has provoked new worries. The suspected assailant had served four years in prison for plotting a terror attack and suffered from hallucinations and other severe psychiatric problems, officials said. In recent weeks, he posted about Hamas and the war in Gaza on X, formerly Twitter. After his arrest on Saturday, he told the police he acted because of the deaths of Muslims in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories.


“We know that events with strong repercussions in the media impact psychologically fragile people,” the French official said.

French authorities have huddled in meetings since the killing to determine whether the government needs new powers to stop attacks. Communication using encrypted apps such as WhatsApp is a key concern, officials said.

“The law today does not give the police complete power to look at what’s happening on encrypted networks,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said this week. “That’s the first problem.”

France has been on high alert since a few days after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. The killing of a teacher in the north of France spurred the government to raise the terror alert to the highest level. Authorities charged a Russian refugee who pledged allegiance to Islamic State in the slaying. That required schools to cancel many trips, boosted patrols by French soldiers and triggered additional police protection at potential terrorism targets, such as airports and religious institutions.

Across the Rhine, German authorities also say the threat is acute. On Saturday, police in southern Germany ordered a Christmas market near Stuttgart to shut down for three hours after they said they had been warned about a possible attack.

Terrorism prosecutors last week said they were investigating two teenagers who were detained by police on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack. A German official confirmed local media reports that the German and Russian nationals had discussed targeting a synagogue and a Christmas market in Leverkusen, in western Germany.

Days later, authorities in the state of Lower Saxony said they had detained a man who had threatened to target a public gathering during the year-end holidays.

Haldenwang, the German intelligence official, said recent calls by jihadists for Muslims to attack the West and statements by al Qaeda and Islamic State focusing on the conflict in the Middle East had struck a nerve among highly emotional followers in the West. The spectrum of potential attackers was also growing, he warned, with Hamas and Hezbollah sympathizers, pro-Palestinian activists, Turkish extremists and far-left militants—who hadn’t generally been involved in attacks in the West recently—all now possible candidates for radicalization.

In the U.K., police said reports from the public to the government’s antiterror hotline more than doubled after Oct. 7 compared with a year earlier.

“We’re acutely aware of the energizing effect the conflict could have on those with extremist or terrorist intent,” said Laurence Taylor, deputy director of the U.K.’s counterterrorism policing unit.

Last month, senior U.K. government ministers held an emergency meeting to assess the terror threat amid a surge in hate incidents against both Jews and Muslims in the country. Currently the U.K. terror threat level is “substantial”—which means an attack is likely—but hasn’t been raised following the Oct. 7 attack in Israel.

In November, two women were charged with terrorism after allegedly displaying pro-Hamas symbols, including paragliders, at a London protest.

The increase in antisemitic acts since Oct. 7 has been a particular concern. European authorities have registered thousands of them over the past eight weeks, with more than 1,500 in France alone. Germany’s main antisemitism watchdog said last week its local reporting centers had recorded 994 verified antisemitic incidents between Oct. 7 and Nov. 9, a more than fourfold increase over the average for 2022.

Christmas markets, a popular attraction for Germans and tourists in the days leading up to Christmas, are also a security concern.Photo: michaela rehle/Reuters
Germany’s most devastating terror attack took place in December 2016 when Anis Amri, a rejected Tunisian asylum seeker and drug dealer, rammed a stolen truck into a Christmas market on Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz, leaving 13 dead and 67 wounded. Amri fled the scene and died days later in a confrontation with police in Milan.

Since then, authorities have sought to secure the thousands of markets where Germans and tourists alike gather daily in the four weeks leading to Christmas. Physical barriers such as concrete slabs or steel pollards and bag checks are now frequent features of the events.

In France, a major concern for authorities is the hundreds of Islamists who have been released from jail in recent years after being convicted of terrorism during Islamic State’s rise around a decade ago. Authorities say that includes the man suspected of stabbing the tourist to death over the weekend.

After leaving prison in March 2020, Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab was in touch with a Russian refugee from Chechnya who later decapitated the teacher Samuel Paty in October 2020. He was placed under closer surveillance after that.

Rajabpour-Miyandoab was suffering from severe psychological problems and had stopped taking his medication, authorities said. Darmanin, the French interior minister, said that around 30% of people flagged for extremism have mental disorders. A judge, however, declined to require him to undergo psychiatric treatment.

“The prefect can’t arrest someone in the street or at home and order him to a psychiatrist,” Darmanin said. “That should change.”

Advancing to Khan Yunis, the IDF encounters most intensive fighting of Gaza war so far
After two months of combat in the Gaza Strip, the IDF is facing even tougher fighting as its moves on Khan Yunis ■ The U.S. and IDF General Staff believe that Netanyahu is acting from political motives ■ What did the defense establish do in the nine years it knew about Hamas’ underground tunnels?

Amos Harel

It sounds a little strange to say this after two months of hard war, but the fighting in the Gaza Strip is actually intensifying now. The Israel Defense Forces have significantly expanded their offensive in the southern Strip, entering the city of Khan Yunis on Tuesday. Meanwhile, troops are still fighting tough battles in some of the last Hamas strongholds in the northern Strip, where the terror organization continues to maintain control.

It seems that the fighting in Gaza has moved to a different phase, and Israel will soon find out if it has managed to cause further significant damage to Hamas military infrastructures, and whether such a move advances its ambitions of dismantling the organization’s military and governing capabilities.

Senior figures in the army’s Southern Command described the fighting over the past 24 hours as the most widespread and intensive since the start of the ground assault in late October. Three different divisions are on the offensive. In the northern Gaza Strip, the 162nd Division has entered the Jabalya refugee camp north of Gaza City. Concurrently, the 36th Division has waged battle in the Shujaiyeh neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, aided by very heavy air force attacks, and killed close to a hundred Hamas members.

Although the commander of the Hamas regional battalion was killed in the bombardment along with some of his company commanders, the organization has managed to gather many hundreds of armed militants in the neighborhood who are trying to snipe at the heels of the Israeli forces. The army announced that four fighters from the 188th Armored Brigade were killed in the fighting on Monday. Three of the soldiers were crew members of a Merkava 4 tank.

Concurrently, forces acted rapidly, arriving earlier than scheduled to the city of Khan Yunis in the southern part of the Strip. An IDF infantry trooper was killed in the skirmishes on Monday. The Palestinians reported heavy bombardments and many dozens killed. (The Palestinian health ministry, controlled by Hamas, always describes the casualties as civilians and doesn’t note the organization’s losses. Various estimates of Hamas’ losses thus far have been circulated in the IDF; the highest reached 6,000 on Tuesday.)

PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT

The fighting in Khan Yunis has already reached the center of the city. The Arab media are reporting tanks advancing on the city from the north and the east. Khan Yunis is where one of Hamas’ five regional brigades is deployed. It numbers four battalions and has hardly sustained any damage until the current offensive. Israel estimates that at least until recently, senior Hamas figures were also staying there, under the leadership of Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza.

Sinwar and his close partner in leadership, Mohammed Deif, were born and raised in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, located in the west of the city. For the time being, Israel is not trying to drive people away from the camp. On the other hand, the Southern Command has called on residents to evacuate some neighborhoods on the northern and eastern outskirts of the city, and to move to parts of the city described as “safer” nearby. Movement is mostly toward the Rafah area. The Mouassi area, the open farmland near the coast between Khan Yunis and Rafah (close to where the Israeli settlements of Gush Katif were located prior to the 2005 disengagement), is still not very populated.

Compared to the mass evacuation of the population from the northern Strip, the responsiveness of the Palestinian residents is partial. This has to do with the fact that some of them have already become refugees after heeding Israeli warnings and moving from the Strip’s north to its south about a month ago. The humanitarian crisis in the south of Gaza is very severe despite the increase in the number of aid trucks entering the enclave, in accordance with American demands.

In the near future, the IDF is expected to complete most of its offensive moves in the northern Gaza Strip. At that point, a decision will have to be made on whether to beef up the offensive in Khan Yunis with more troops. Concurrently, the IDF is preparing to start releasing some reserve troops in the Gaza Strip. The intention is to rotate units out for R&R and to replace them with other troops held back in reserve in the south, but yet to be deployed in the Strip.

In principle, this is a needed move – one that will begin to ease the burden on the reserve troops after two highly exceptional months of combat service. But the IDF, as it does, is proceeding in a disorganized fashion. The reservists from the units yet to enter Gaza were already released last week, and they expected a relatively long pause. Now the gameplan has changed at army headquarters, and the personal plans of thousands of reservists will be disrupted accordingly, due to contradictory orders under the excuse of “there’s a war on.” It also indicates a lack of internalization by the senior staff, all career military professionals, regarding the unique difficulties associated with reserve service during wartime.

Hamas casualties

The level of damage to the chain of control and command at some Hamas units in the northern Gaza Strip was demonstrated on Tuesday by a photo distributed by the IDF, captured in a raid on a Hamas headquarters. It shows the commander of the Hamas regional brigade in the north, Ahmad Randor, and his 11 most senior staff officers, including his second-in-command and the battalion commanders reporting to him. The group had their photo taken, prior to the war, in a narrow military office in one of the tunnels. Six of those in the photo, including Randor, have since been killed by Israeli assassination operations.

This is not the state of affairs in all Hamas units, but the continued fighting is expanding the casualty list among senior commanders. The systematic targeting has yet to climb to the level of Sinwar and his circle, and this is indeed one of the difficulties encountered by Israel. There is an enormous operational and intelligence effort by the entire intelligence community, with the clear aim of getting to Sinwar before the war ends. Hitting him can also serve Israeli leadership as a justification to reduce the offensive and shorten the war – but it is unclear whether this is attainable on a short schedule.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ Middle East team members are part of an American delegation visiting Israel this week. Like other visits by senior administration figures lately, the guests are trying to find out what the hell Israel is planning, but are struggling to do so because of the intentional fog blown by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Biden administration’s impressions, which is shared by army HQ, is that it’s all political – Netanyahu is not running Israeli strategy based on relevant considerations, and is avoiding a discussion of his plans for “the day after,” while obstinately refusing to leave the Palestinian Authority a foothold in the Gaza Strip only due to coalition constrictions from his far-right partners.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported on the Israeli plan to flood the Gaza Strip tunnels with seawater. According to the Journal, Israel has built a system capable of pumping hundreds of thousands of liters of water from the Mediterranean Sea to collapse the tunnels. The newspaper’s report claims that the immense underground array dug by Hamas can be flooded in weeks.

This appears to be a somewhat hyperbolic estimate, but it seems that recently there have been preliminary signs of more systematic IDF action against the tunnels. Which once again raises the question, which becomes more urgent each time, that was asked after Hamas terrorists used the tunnels to infiltrate into Israel during the 2014 Gaza war. Hamas built an immense underground array in the Gaza Strip in preparation for conflict with Israel. What has the security establishment done, and what interest has the political echelon shown, in finding a solution to the defensive tunnels in the time that’s passed since then?

Approximately two civilians have been killed for every dead Hamas fighter in the Gaza Strip, senior military officials said Monday, adding that the IDF was deploying high-tech mapping software to try to reduce noncombatant deaths.

Asked about media reports that 5,000 Hamas fighters had been killed, one of the senior officials told reporters at a briefing, “The numbers are more or less right.”

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says Israel’s military campaign, in response to the terror group’s murderous attacks on October 7, has killed around 15,900 people so far, most of them women and children. These figures cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both Hamas terrorists and civilians, and people killed as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires. Hamas has never said how many of its members have been killed.

Israel launched an offensive aimed at destroying Hamas’s military and governance capabilities after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel from Gaza, killing some 1,200 people and dragging over 240 hostages into Gaza. The vast majority of those killed as gunmen seized border communities were civilians — including babies, children and the elderly.

“I’m not saying it’s not bad that we have a ratio of two to one,” one of the senior officials at the briefing said, adding that the use of human shields was part of Hamas’s “core strategy.”

“Hopefully it [the ratio] will be much lower” in the coming phase of the war, the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The rising death toll and unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza have sparked outrage in much of the world.

‘Consequences of war’

Key ally the United States has cautioned Israel to do more to avoid civilian casualties as operations shift to the south, where many Gazans are seeking refuge after fleeing the devastated north.

To that end, the officials said, the army is using high-tech mapping software to track population movements inside the Gaza Strip and issue evacuation orders.

The system incorporates cellphone and other signals, aerial surveillance and word from local sources, as well as AI, to maintain a constantly updating map showing population concentrations across the territory.

Each of the map’s 623 cells are color-coded, with green designating areas where at least 75 percent of the population has evacuated.

“In the south, because we have basically doubled the population, operations are much more precise,” the official said.

“We are taking much more time to make sure our efforts [at warning civilians] are effective.”

The map — which the military says is the product of eight years of research and development — is available to commanders and units on the ground.

The map is used to coordinate efforts to warn civilians to leave certain areas ahead of impending strikes via SMS, phone calls, leaflet drops and other announcements, and to track the effectiveness of such messaging in real time.

It is similar to one made available online that the military says is intended to enable Gazans to “evacuate from specific places for their safety if required.”

But the United Nations humanitarian office OCHA has questioned the usefulness of such a tool in an area where access to telecommunications and electricity is sporadic.

On Monday night the main telecom company in the Gaza Strip said cellphone and internet service had been cut across the territory.

“I can assure you that we’re doing everything in our power to reduce civilian casualties,” the senior Israeli official said. “But this is part of the consequences of war.”

Israel Says It Has Killed Half of Hamas’s Battalion Commanders
Israel said it has killed about half of Hamas’s midlevel commanders in Gaza and is pressing on the suspected hiding place of the group’s leader, deploying a deliberate strategy to disrupt the militants’ ability to fight in the enclave.

Israel has so far failed to assassinate the U.S.-designated terrorist group’s senior leadership, which includes Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas in Gaza, and Mohammed Deif, head of the group’s armed wing. But fighting is now coalescing around Khan Younis, one of Hamas’s strongholds in the southern strip, where the Israeli military says Sinwar and others could be hunkered down.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that his troops had surrounded Sinwar’s house in Khan Younis. The move is largely viewed as symbolic as the Israeli military assesses if the Hamas militant is hiding underground in the group’s tunnel network. But it proves “our forces can reach anywhere in the Gaza Strip,” Netanyahu said.

The structure of Hamas’s secretive armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, isn’t widely known. But Israel estimates that it has roughly 24 battalions each with 1,000 or more fighters. The Israeli military, which on Wednesday engaged in intense fighting in the north and south of Gaza, has said it has significantly degraded at least 10 of those by taking out midlevel commanders


Israeli forces told residents of Khan Younis to evacuate the eastern and northern neighborhoods as its forces closed in on the city on Tuesday. Palestinians fled from the fighting amid a worsening humanitarian plight. Photo: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
Late on Tuesday, Israel’s military said it killed senior commanders hiding in a tunnel in northern Gaza, frustrating the group’s ability to direct operations in that part of the strip.

Israeli forces also released a photo of what they said was a group of operatives who led battalions and brigades, likely overseeing thousands of Hamas fighters. The military said it had found the photo during fighting and highlighted those in the picture whom it claims to have killed, including the commander of the northern brigade in Gaza, although it didn’t say when the people died. Hamas said late last month that Ahmed al-Ghandour, the head of its northern brigade, had died.

Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Wednesday that the military had broken through Hamas’ defensive lines.  

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“The terrorists are now emerging from the underground tunnels and engaging our forces in close combat. Our forces will continue to further our achievements in Jabalya, Shuja’iyya, and also in the Khan Younis area—the heart of Hamas’ terror,” he said.

Israeli military analysts question the extent of the role of Deif, who is believed to have been rendered disabled by repeated assassination attempts. But Sinwar has been involved in negotiating for the hostages with Israel and military analysts believe Qassam’s deputy leader, Marwan Issa, a Gazan in his late 50s, is still in operation.

“The leadership at the midlevel is in a very bad situation,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu. But, he said, the Hamas system hasn’t collapsed yet. “They are still making decisions, they are still fighting.”

Illustrating the ability of Hamas’s leadership to continue operations: Rockets fired from Gaza have increased. Israeli airstrikes have also intensified since the end of a cease-fire. Israel says it has killed up to 5,000 fighters out of a total of 30,000 in Hamas’s armed wing, although those figures are only estimates.

Killing Hamas commanders will hurt the group’s ability to fight but it won’t necessarily defeat them, as other fighters will take their place, according to Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.

Targeting commanders is “very important for two reasons: You degrade a force’s ability to execute more complex operations…and you also remove experienced personnel,” he said.


Israeli military vehicles near Israel’s border with Gaza.Photo: jack guez/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Palestinians mourn after a deadly airstrike on the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. Photo: Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images
Israeli forces are engaging in street-to-street combat into the militants’ stronghold of Khan Younis, the biggest city in the southern part of the strip, where Sinwar grew up and which is considered a main hub for Hamas, as fighting has shifted south. The battle for the city of over 400,000 could prove decisive in isolating pockets of Hamas fighters outside their main command-and-control centers. A video from Khan Younis taken Wednesday showed destroyed buildings with gunfire in the background.

Israel’s stated goal of eradicating Hamas could prove difficult because as well as being a militant group, it is a political movement followed by Palestinians, said Hugh Lovatt, a senior policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. But the deaths of its leadership would give Israel a public-relations boost that could help create the conditions to end the war, Lovatt added.

“Being able to point to the elimination of Mohammed Deif or Yahya Sinwar would give the Israeli government a lot of capital that could allow it to then claim that its military objectives have been accomplished,” he said.

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The next stage of the fight threatens to push tens of thousands of civilians toward Rafah, near the Egyptian border, where families are sleeping in tents and parks, and food and water are scarce. Around 70% of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million is in the southern part of the strip, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. That includes the hundreds of thousands of people who fled the northern part of the enclave in recent weeks at the direction of the Israeli military.

Egypt has reinforced security cordons around its border with Gaza, while tents have been set up in the cities of Sheikh Zuwayed and Rafah to prepare for the likely inflow of refugees. It has also closed off the port city of Al Arish, roughly one hour’s drive west of Rafah that has become a collection point for humanitarian supplies for Gaza, Egyptian officials said.

The likely flood of refugees comes as Egypt’s economy struggles with surging food prices, a depreciating currency and criticism of President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi ahead of an election Dec. 10. Gulf states have floated the idea of providing financial aid to Cairo in return for accepting Palestinian refugees, Egyptian officials said.

Sisi has warned against a potential refugee crisis within the country’s border that would pose security threats, raising the possibility that more extreme groups than Hamas would enter the Sinai Peninsula.

Health authorities in the Hamas-run territory say that since the end of the cease-fire and resumption of fighting on Dec. 1, at least 1,207 Palestinians have died in the enclave. In total, more than 15,900 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, most of them women and children, according to the health authorities. The figures don’t distinguish between militants and civilians.

United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said Tuesday that nowhere is safe in Gaza. “Such blatant disregard for basic humanity must stop. The fighting must stop,” he said.

The Israeli military’s humanitarian unit said Wednesday that it had facilitated the opening of a new route for aid after parts of the strip’s main road around Khan Younis were closed because of fighting.

On Wednesday, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres took the rare step of formally warning the international body that the war in Gaza now poses a wider threat to global security and stability.

In a letter to the Security Council, Guterres invoked an article of the U.N. Charter, one that U.N. officials said hasn’t been used for decades, to call for a cease-fire.

“The situation is fast deteriorating into a catastrophe with potentially irreversible implications for Palestinians as a whole and for peace and security in the region,” he wrote. “Such an outcome must be avoided at all cost.“

The appeal drew a blistering response from Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., who called the letter a “new moral low” for Guterres.

In another sign of the deterioration of already strained ties between Israel and the U.N., Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said he had revoked the visa of the agency’s top humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, Lynn Hastings. Hastings criticized Israel and failed to condemn Hamas for its Oct. 7 attacks that sparked the war, Cohen said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Hastings didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups hold more than 100 hostages taken from Israel in attacks on Oct. 7 that Israeli authorities say killed 1,200 people. Family members of those still held as well as those freed last month met on Tuesday with Netanyahu and his war cabinet to press them to focus on returning the remaining captives.

“The meeting was very tense,” said one family member who took part. She said that four to five freed hostages testified to the war cabinet about what they had experienced in captivity, including sexual assault. She said that families worry about the ability of those remaining to survive under the difficult conditions of captivity in Gaza.

Netanyahu and his ministers spoke in the meeting, but it was clear that they believed the fighting against Hamas must continue to pressure the group to make concessions, she added.

“We succeeded in returning home 110 hostages by a combination of a ground incursion of unprecedented strength and a continuous diplomatic effort,” Netanyahu said Tuesday. “This is the only way to also return the hostages who are still in Hamas captivity, and we are committed to doing so.”

The risk of a broader conflict involving Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and other Iran-backed proxies still looms. On Wednesday, the Israeli military said it exchanged fire on its northern border from Lebanon and had intercepted a surface-to-air-missile toward Israel in the south near Eilat.

As it planned for Oct. 7, Hamas lulled Israel into a false sense of calm

TEL AVIV — Hamas spent more than a year planning its historic assault on Israel, following battle plans built on open-source materials and high-level intelligence, Israeli intelligence officers told a small group of journalists this week.

The sophistication of the attack, and the growing evidence of long-term, strategic planning by Hamas, sheds new light on the reach of the group’s intelligence apparatus and the complacency of Israel’s vaunted security state.

Even the location of Monday’s briefing was telling: the headquarters of Amshat, a previously defunct intelligence unit within the Israel Defense Forces charged with gathering documents and other technical materials relevant to war.

Amshat was disbanded five years ago, according to the IDF. “Israel, essentially, had decided it was done with war,” said a person familiar with the unit, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. It was revived after Oct. 7 — the bloodiest day in the country’s history, when 1,200 people were killed.

The assault stunned Israelis, who, for years, had been assured by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military leaders that Hamas had been deterred, its fighters safely fenced off inside Gaza. But across the Israeli army, analysts had warned for months than a multipronged attack was in the works: an unprecedented infiltration of Israel by land, air and sea.

Many of the 3,000 combatants who stormed Israel’s billion-dollar border fence with Gaza as dawn broke on Oct. 7 carried battle plans with specific instructions, the Israeli intelligence officers said. Some involved plans to hit military bases as far north as Rehovot and as far east as Beersheva, as well as two spots — code named points 103 and 106 — deep in the Mediterranean Sea.

Israel has increased offshore natural gas production in recent years, although it is unclear whether energy installations were the target.

“We don’t know what they wanted there,” said an IDF officer at Amshat headquarters, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with military protocol. His team has spent the past two months sifting through computers, notebooks, pamphlets and communications equipment.

The fighters came into Israel with detailed battle plans that included maps of the internal structures of military bases and civilian towns, extensive lists of weaponry and equipment used by each of its units, and checklists for killing and capturing men, women and children. They were instructed to kill hostages if they proved too much trouble. One document included a list of phrases transliterated from Arabic to Hebrew: “take your pants off,” “we will kill the hostages,” “how do you use the weapon?”

Another pamphlet included a quote: “your enemy is a disease which has no cure other than to cut out their livers and their hearts.”

Many of the papers and notebooks were handwritten and riddled with code words, complicating the effort to digitize and organize them. Some were uploaded to computers gathered from battle zones in southern Israel; others have been recovered during Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza.

The IDF officers used disposable latex gloves to handle the evidence, some of which was found with traces of human remains.

The battle plans confirm what individual soldiers in separate units across the Israeli military had been warning about for months, in some cases for more than a year — that militants were not simply carrying out drills across the border in Gaza, as many IDF leaders had claimed, but were actively preparing their largest-ever military operation.

An IDF intelligence document — code named “Jericho Wall,” — numbering more than 30 pages, was presented in May 2022 to Aharon Haliva, the head of IDF intelligence, and Eliezer Toledano, the head of the IDF’s southern command, the Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported last week.

The PowerPoint presentation did not specify a date for the attack. But intelligence officers understood that Hamas was planning to launch its forces on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, or on a Jewish holiday, when fewer soldiers would be guarding the border.

Other details were chillingly prescient: The assault would involve an initial barrage of rockets to serve as cover for the storming of Israeli communities and military bases, and drones and snipers would be used to disable surveillance cameras, according to Ayala Hasson, a Kan journalist.

Neither Haliva nor Toledano have commented on the “Jericho Wall” document, whose existence was later reported on by the New York Times.

A security officer confirmed to The Washington Post that IDF intelligence had gathered evidence of plans for a large-scale Hamas attack more than a year ago. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

In April, he said, the military issued an internal alert about Hamas infiltration targeting the kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip, citing concrete evidence that the operation was likely to involve hundreds of militants.

In August, weeks before the attack, new intelligence pointed to an imminent attack, the security officer said.

“The IDF increased its readiness and believed they stopped it,” he said. “They now see it was part of Hamas’s deception.”

Warnings were again dismissed. Communities on the Israeli side of the border were never notified.

Israeli security authorities issued permits for the Nova music festival to take place a few miles from the Gaza border; 364 people were killed at the festival and dozens of others taken hostage on Oct. 7.

“To think that there was information and we were not told is more than an oversight; it is a betrayal,” said Rami Samuel, one of the event’s organizers. “An oversight can’t cost the life of 1,200 people.”

For years, in public statements and private diplomacy, Hamas had claimed that it was more interested in building Gaza economically than in renewing a conflict with Israel.

Haliva said in September 2022 that although Hamas was involved in military activities, “we see that the processes being undertaken vis-à-vis Israel to stabilize the economy and to allow entry to laborers have potential for bringing years of quiet.”

Hamas had largely refrained from firing rockets at Israel after 2021. In May, it remained on the sidelines as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group in Gaza, engaged in a short-lived conflict with Israel.

Hamas officials even provided Israel with intelligence on PIJ to reinforce the impression that they were interested in collaboration, an Israeli security official told The Post on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the news media.

There were plans to discuss the issue again after Oct. 7, the holiday of Simchat Torah, according to the Kan report.

Also in recent months, large demonstrations were staged at the fence in Gaza to get the IDF used to the sight of crowds at the border, and, more broadly, “to lull Israel into complacency,” said Miri Eisin, a former senior IDF intelligence officer.

Eisin said that Israel’s security apparatus, and many of Israel’s allies, were more concerned with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group to the north that in 2018 declared plans to conquer the Galilee region.

“There were plans being taken very seriously — they were up north, with Hezbollah,” she said.

Netanyahu has sought to distance himself from the intelligence failure. His office has not commented on whether the prime minister was aware of the Hamas battle plan outlined in “Jericho Wall.”

Some of the soldiers who tried to sound the alarm were among the first deployed on the morning of the attack.

Col. Asaf Hamami, 41, commander of the Gaza Division’s Southern Brigade was killed battling militants at Kibbutz Nirim. On Saturday, the IDF changed his status from “missing” to “slain during combat” and notified his family that his body was being held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

His mother, Clara, said her son’s attempts to warn the military about what was coming were dismissed repeatedly.

“You warned, you alerted, you told them, you saw what was about to happen, that we should not be complacent,” his mother said as she eulogized him at a military cemetery in Tel Aviv on Monday. “There were those who said to you, ‘You only saw the worst.’ Then the worst came, on that black Saturday, on Oct. 7.”

Israeli female soldiers shot in crotch, vagina, breasts on October 7’

(Warning: This story describes deeply disturbing events and testimonials in graphic detail.)


Blood in houses when Hamas terrorists infiltrated Kibbutz Be'eri, and 30 other nearby communities in Southern Israel on October 7, killing more than 1400 people, and taking more than 200 hostages into Gaza, near the Israeli-Gaza border.

Expressions of agony survived their deaths, army reservist Shari Mendes said as she described what experts saw when they identified and prepared for burial the bodies of female victims of Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

“These women arrived with their eyes open, their mouths grimacing, their fists clenched,” said Mendes, whose IDF rabbinical unit worked with the bodies, all of which were brought to the IDF’s Shura base.

“The soldiers that we dealt with had expressions of agony on their faces still,” said Mendes. “I remember one young woman whose arm was broken in so many places it was difficult for us to lay her arm in the burial shroud, her leg too. In her case, the entire left side of her body was shredded, torn apart, most likely by a grenade.”

Gender-based violence

Mendes spoke Monday at a sidebar event at the United Nations in New York, organized by Israel’s mission to the world body. “Hear Our Voices: Sexual and gender-based violence in the October 7 Hamas terror attack” was meant to highlight stories of Hamas rape and gender mutilation during the attack, which have been largely swept under the rug by the international community, including the UN.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and UN Women issued condemnation of such acts only last week.

“Our team commander saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch – intimate parts/vagina – or shot in the breast. This seemed to be a systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims,” Mendes said.

In a filmed testimonial played at the event, a survivor said she watched a terrorist who had cut off a woman’s breasts and played with them – after he had raped her.

“Our unit has seen bodies that were beheaded or had limbs cut off, mutilated,” Mendes said. “One young woman came in with no legs: they had been cut off. We saw several severed heads, one with a large kitchen knife still embedded in the neck.”

“Charred remains arrived and had to be identified and prepared for burial. These bodies were burned beyond recognition, often without arms or legs; they did not resemble anything human,” Mendes said.

“Sometimes we sifted through piles of ash that disintegrated as we touched them. These soldiers were burnt alive at very high temperatures.”

Terrible disfiguring

Among bodies that were not burned, the heads were often badly disfigured. “Heads and faces were covered in blood. They were shot in the eyes, face, and skull,” she said. “It was often impossible for families to be shown faces, and it seems as if mutilation of these women’s faces was an objective in their murders.”

Some had their “heads bashed in so badly that their brains were spilling out,” Mendes continued. “Some were shot in the head so many times at close range that their heads were almost blown off.

“In some cases, this was done after death, just out of cruelty,” she said, explaining that the absence of blood in the wounds showed that none was left in the body to drain out.

Shura base personnel's grim work

Mendes arrived at Shura the day after the Hamas attack in which the terror group massacred over 1,200 people, including hundreds of soldiers stationed on the southern border, and kidnapped about 240 people.

The scene that greeted her that morning was “unimaginable in scale,” she said.

“Body bags were piled to the ceiling, lining the corridors in every room. Refrigerator trucks were waiting outside, also full.

“Body bags just kept coming in all shapes and sizes. Many were oozing liquids and the floors were wet. The smell of death was already unbearable. It is impossible to overemphasize the number of bodies we were dealing with; the sense of shock and despair,” she said.

Teams have been working to identify bodies at Shura around the clock since that day, Mendes said.

Hamas “did not show these women any honor in life, but it was important to us and our teams, groups of women, that we showed them deep love and gentleness as we prepared them for burial.”

Female IDF teams who prepared the bodies for burial were often the last to see the bodies.

“We held them in our hearts even just for a moment, as if they were our daughters; we really loved them,” she said.

As the child of a Holocaust survivor, she added, “I understand the importance of bearing witness. I am here to be the voice of those who cannot testify.”

Sheryl Sandberg: We can all agree—nothing justifies rape

Others who addressed the event about the importance of condemning the use of rape as an act of war included former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton; the latter sent a taped message.

Sandberg said that rape was recognized as an illegal act of war only 30 years ago, but not enough has been done since. “That is why this moment is so critical. We have come so far in establishing that rape is a crime against humanity, and we have come so far in believing survivors of sexual assault in so many situations,” she said.

“That is why the silence on these war crimes is dangerous. It threatens to undo decades of progress, to undo an entire movement. The world has to decide whom to believe. Do we believe the Hamas spokesperson that rape is forbidden and that therefore it could not have possibly happened on October 7? Or do we believe the women whose bodies tell us how they spent the last moments of their lives?”

Sandberg said that the victims of those rapes could have told their own story if only they had been allowed to live, and that in their names, the principle that rape should never be used as an act of war should be recognized.

“This truth must be upheld despite the politics of our time. No matter what marches you are attending, what flag you are flying, what religions you are practicing...there is one thing we can all agree on. There is no circumstance that justifies rape.”

Clinton said that as a global community, “we must respond to weaponized sexual violence wherever it happens, with absolute condemnation. There can be no justifications and no excuses. Rape as a weapon of war is a crime against humanity.”

“Organizations, governments and individuals who are committed to a better future for women and girls have a responsibility to condemn all violence against women,” she stated. “It is outrageous that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their eyes and their hearts to the victims of Hamas.”

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Fight for Gaza’s Khan Younis Puts Israel, U.S. on Collision Course
TEL AVIV—The southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis is a critical target for Israel’s military—strategically and symbolically. The centuries-old market town is the suspected hiding place of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and the militant group’s most significant remaining military stronghold.

But the fight to capture it risks putting Israel on a collision course with the Biden administration, which has called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties and ease humanitarian deprivation in Gaza, and to hew to a more limited war aim of expelling Hamas from power.

Khan Younis, a city of 400,000 people in normal times, almost doubled in size as Gazans fled there from the bombed-out remains of Gaza City. That makes it a treacherous battlefield as Israel fights militants in the midst of crowded neighborhoods.

Winning control of southern Gaza’s biggest city would allow Israeli troops to surround Hamas’s remaining fighters and effectively remove the U.S.-designated terrorist group from power in the Gaza Strip.

Israel would need to decide whether to keep waging conventional war against remaining Hamas forces with the airstrikes, ground forces and artillery that have impaired the militants’ fighting power but also caused civilian casualties. Or it could begin to shift to limited special-forces operations to target remaining Hamas cells, a potentially yearslong fight that would have U.S. support but also require a long-term presence that could be criticized as occupation.

In Israel last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told officials in Israel’s war cabinet that the Biden administration believed the conflict should end in weeks, not months, said U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions. Israeli officials made no guarantees but expressed their interest in a return to normal, particularly so that the country doesn’t take a hit economically, the officials said.

“We all recognize the longer this war goes on, the harder it gets for everybody,” said a U.S. official.

The U.S. and Israel have also used different rhetoric about war aims, with the U.S. focusing on ending Hamas’s reign in power and some Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, talking about eradicating the militant group—something Washington sees as impossible.

There is also some daylight between the U.S. and Israel positions on how much aid to allow into Gaza and when to negotiate for the release of hostages, which include at least eight U.S.-Israeli dual nationals. Israeli officials say their goals remain aligned with the U.S., even if the messaging sometimes differs.

Looming over all of it is a sense that domestic political pressure on President Biden, who is heading into an election year, has put a time limit on such active American support for the Israeli war effort. Biden’s support for Israel has hurt him with left-leaning Democrats, polls show, as images of dead children and other innocent civilians proliferate across news pages and social media.

President Biden’s support for Israel has hurt him with left-leaning Democrats.Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Officials in Hamas-controlled Gaza have said the death toll in the enclave has risen past 16,000 in the war, a figure that is mostly women and children but doesn’t distinguish between militants and civilians. Israel began its military action in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, which Israel has said killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and included terrorist attacks on kibbutzim and a dance party.

Blinken has said he told Israeli officials that the high civilian death toll from Israel’s assault on northern Gaza mustn’t be repeated in the south. However, U.S. officials have said that no explicit consequences were laid out. Withholding U.S. aid to Israel and other potential penalties aren’t yet on the table, officials said.

U.S. officials said they hope their pressure campaign will persuade the Israelis to view limiting civilian casualties as an imperative. They point to Netanyahu’s initial unwillingness to permit aid into Gaza, something he eventually allowed.

U.S. concerns about the execution of the conflict and the way in which the Israelis have described their aims have grown increasingly public. While U.S. officials had for weeks positioned themselves as being in lockstep with Israel, there are signs that patience with Israel’s current approach is running low.

“I have repeatedly made clear to Israel’s leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and a strategic imperative,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California on Saturday. “And so I have personally pushed Israeli leaders to avoid civilian casualties, and to shun irresponsible rhetoric, and to prevent violence by settlers in the West Bank, and to dramatically expand access to humanitarian aid.”

Giora Eiland, a former Israeli general and national security adviser, said the American demands on aid and objections to mass evacuations of civilian areas are counterproductive.

“We are fighting with one hand tied behind our back because we are supposed to take care of the population in Gaza,” Eiland said. Of the Biden administration, he said: “With one hand they are helping us, and with the other, they are helping Hamas.“

Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said Israel has no intention of letting up until its goals are achieved. “This could take time. There could be certain stages to this,” Hecht said. “Israel won’t back down, for as long as it takes.”

Beyond Khan Younis, the U.S. and Israel are also divided over how to respond to the Iran-backed Houthi forces who control northern Yemen and have been firing drones and ballistic missiles at Israel for weeks. Israel and the U.S. have shot down most of these airborne threats, but the U.S. has told Israel to let the American military respond to the Houthis, instead of risking an Israeli response that could expand the conflict, U.S. and other government officials said.

In Gaza, Israel has sought a middle way to keep Washington on its side. It has kept humanitarian aid flowing since a cease-fire ended last week, and Israeli military officials say they are increasing the capacity to let more in daily. It has also sectioned off Gaza into hundreds of numbered blocks and broadcasts each day to Gazans which blocks are unsafe—a move Gazans have said is hard to follow but that U.S. officials say is an unprecedented step to minimize civilian deaths.  

Israel has warned Gazans to leave areas in central and eastern Khan Younis, as it moves tanks and troops into the heart of the city and continues punishing airstrikes. Those warnings are pushing thousands more Gazans into the strip’s southernmost city, Rafah, where people are already sleeping on the street, on benches and in parks, and food, water and fuel are scarce for most people.

Israel hasn’t telegraphed whether it would take the fight to Rafah after Khan Younis. Rafah presents an even more challenging humanitarian picture than Khan Younis, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians trapped between the military and the Egyptian border. The U.S. has said displacing Gazans outside their territory is a line Israel shouldn’t cross.

“Lately, I have been asked whether we have the legitimacy to continue fighting, and to that I answer: We do not have the legitimacy to stop,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. “There is only one legitimate thing to do: to win against Hamas, to strike them and eliminate them—destroying their governing and military capabilities, and bringing the hostages home.”

The North remembers: The long-term Hezbollah challenge - analysis

Israel is focused on defeating Hamas in Gaza. The Hamas threat has to be defeated due to the extensive crimes the group committed on October 7. Leaving any part of Hamas intact would send a message to the region that Israel is not willing or able to destroy a group that massacred 1,200 people in Israel and still holds 138 hostages.

However, a larger shadow continues to fall over northern Israel. The Hezbollah threat in the North not only continues to exist but there is a lack of clarity on how to remove it from the border.

After the Hamas attack on October 7, it was clear that Israel could face a multi-front war, if Hezbollah chose to attack as well. In addition, Iran has proxies in Syria and Iraq and backs the Houthis in Yemen. Tehran has also sought to inflame the West Bank via support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Iran sees all these groups as a series of fronts against Israel and it seeks to “unify” them.

This is something Iran has worked on for years. Today this threat has been manifested through Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea as well as near-daily attacks by Hezbollah and even threats from Iranian-backed militias in Syria. Israel’s Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi HaLevi also said this week that Israel has detained 1,200 Hamas operatives in the West Bank since October 7.

This week, IDF spokesperson R.-Adm. Daniel Hagari said that the Israel Air Force “attacked a series of Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon today, including posts and military sites where weapons were stored and terrorists of the organization operated.” The military has sought to “improve” the situation in the North. “We are working on this around the clock and attacked in Lebanon today for this purpose,” he said.

Hezbollah threat persists, despite losses

Hezbollah has suffered losses, with up to 100 men injured and killed. But the Lebanese-based terrorist group continues its threats daily. It’s not clear if Iran wants it to do more. During the pause in fighting in Gaza, Hezbollah also paused its attacks. This seems to show that the group would accept “quiet for quiet.”

However, we noted in a report on December 6 that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with northern community authorities from evacuated communities and asserted that Hezbollah would need to choose between a negotiated process and backing away from Israel’s border, or the IDF would take action. “There is one possibility that we will reach a different deal… with international negotiators that they will respect our presence here," he said: "The second possibility is that we will be forced to do it by force.”

There was also discussion this week that some kind of new border deal could take place, backed by the US. Washington helped broker a maritime deal with Lebanon in 2022. However, the deal led to increased provocations by Hezbollah, which has not been deterred. In fact, with winter coming, it’s possible that the terrorist group even feels empowered after two months of low-level conflict.

There’s no evidence that the Lebanese government or the international community can get the organization to leave the border. Hezbollah thrives and profits by occupying southern Lebanon. After the 2006 war, it wasn‘t supposed to restock its arsenal and take over southern Lebanon, but it did.

The international community has done the same thing with Hezbollah that it did with Hamas: essentially enabling these illegally armed groups to grow into terror armies. Many countries and agendas are served by these groups.

Iran is one example, but Hamas is also hosted by Qatar; Russia has not condemned Hamas and doesn’t seem to mind Hezbollah. China, which also works with Iran and Russia, doesn’t seem to want to invest in stability in the region by condemning these groups. It appears that many anti-Western countries see Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups as useful against the West.

Iran exploits this to get countries to see the Gaza war as a regional conflict against Israel and the US. The Houthis have also increased their attacks and are being appeased. This means that the chances of Hezbollah leaving the border appear slim. At the same time, Israel doesn’t want to accept a situation where the terrorist group sits on the border and threatens to commit an attack similar to October 7.

No good options

There are no good options here. The Iranian ability to push its proxies closer to Israel over the last decade has been successful. Despite Israel waging the "Campaign Between the Wars" in Syria to prevent Iranian entrenchment, Iran has moved other pawns across the board. One pawn is Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Jenin. Another was Hamas in Gaza. Others include the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Syria.

Some of these pawns are now so large in terms of threats, that they have reached the far border of the chess board and have become rooks. Israel may have been focused on “third circle” threats or “depth” in the region—including the Abraham Accords and other issues—but Iran was focusing on the meat and potatoes of terrorism.

Iran’s proxies move slowly and continuously forward. They erode states and carve out areas of chaos and destabilization. For instance, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would be challenged by administering Gaza, if it can’t even get a hold of the chaos in Jenin.

In essence, this is how the North of Israel remembers its role in the conflict in Gaza. While Israel must defeat Hamas, the real threat remains in the North and other areas.

. The IDF and Shin Bet killed two senior Hamas terrorists who operated in Hamas’s intelligence unit in Gaza, the IDF and Shin Bet stated on Thursday.

This week, the Israeli air force, operating on intelligence supplied by the IDF and Shin Bet, successfully targeted  Abdel Aziz Rantisi and Ahmed Aiush.

Rantisi, a seasoned intelligence operative, was responsible for Hamas’s field intelligence in Gaza and had been among those who planned the October 7 massacre in southern Israel, the IDF said.

Aiush was an operative from the observation unit of Hamas’s Carrara Battalion.

The two Hamas members were both killed in a strike on Hamas’s central intelligence command center, the IDF and Shin Bet, added. The command center was a key piece of Hamas infrastructure that was instrumental in the terror organization’s ability to direct and support attacks on IDF soldiers.

Hamas cell fires anti-tank missiles

As Hamas’s intelligence capabilities took a severe hit, the IDF said on Thursday that Israeli intelligence identified a Hamas cell conducting operations and firing anti-tank missiles from within civilian areas of the Gaza Strip.

All members of the terror cell were subsequently killed by a targeted airstrike directed by IDF ground troops.

Hamas infrastructure in civilian and residential areas

Also on Thursday, the IDF announced that it had located more Hamas terror infrastructure embedded in the center of civilian areas in Shejaia, a neighborhood in Gaza City.

The 36th Division, during close-quarters fighting with Hamas terrorists, located and destroyed weapons and subterranean infrastructure located near civilian buildings.

Further, the IDF stated that as soldiers from the Kfir Brigade worked to destroy RPG launchers, ammunition, and other Hamas military equipment being stored inside a civilian residential building, soldiers of the Golani Brigade located and destroyed tunnel shafts and rocket launchers, killing dozens of terrorists during their operations.

The Kfir Brigade soldiers also located a tunnel shaft inside a school.

The IDF added that the 188th Brigade, along with the Yahalom Unit, found and demolished a further seven tunnel shafts in the area. They also found weapons, ammunition, and explosives and located another tunnel shaft in a school area.

This latter shaft reportedly contained dozens of terrorists which were subsequently eliminated.

IDF progress in southern Gaza

Both on Tuesday and Wednesday, the IDF signaled that it had made substantial new advances in Khan Younis, penetrating to the heart of Hamas’s southern capital, and starting to expand attempts to take control of a variety of neighborhoods.

However, despite the advances the IDF has made in north, central, and now southern Gaza predictions for the IDF to take control of southern Gaza have ranged from weeks to the end of January, such that there could still be a long haul before the main round of fighting is over.

Even after the main fighting is over, assuming the IDF defeats Hamas’s large forces, top defense officials expect a lower-grade Hamas insurgency for three to nine months.

One potential sign of progress was a relative reduction in rockets, though there were still frequent sirens along Israel’s South.